


Midnight at the Magisterium

by metaphlame



Category: Dragon Age, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: 1920s, AU, Drabble, Fluff, M/M, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-16
Updated: 2015-12-16
Packaged: 2018-05-07 00:16:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5436107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/metaphlame/pseuds/metaphlame
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cullen, a reluctant policeman far from home, is ordered to shut down one of the city's more flamboyant drinking establishments.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Midnight at the Magisterium

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this last spring after hearing Ramon Tikaram, Dorian's VA, sing [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvPgTVnxvVI). I had to piece it together through a couple emails and flesh it out a little. We're still talking fluff here though. 1920s-era fluff.

_New York, 1922_

The problem with the place, Cullen thought with a grimace as he approached through a soft curtain of rain that pooled in his hat and dripped down, was that it lacked discretion. He eyed the gaudy neon sign with its swirls and starbursts flying out of its stick with a sniff. One needed discretion in these times. Anyone could have told the club owners that. And now that they'd chosen either to ignore such common sense parameters or to remain so ignorant as to never have learned them, Cullen was here to shut them down. 

Those were his orders.

He didn't look like a cop at the moment, it was true. He had taken pains not to. He had scuffed up his already-battered brogans--they needed replacing, he consoled himself when he thought of the cost, and anyway it was too late now--and donned a deliberately nondescript suit jacket from the veteran sleuth two desks over instead of the very cop-like trench he'd grown used to wearing since coming to the states. He looked, he'd told himself in the mirror, like an average patron at the Magisterium.

One which, under other circumstances, he might very well have been.

That was besides the point now, though, he thought briskly, scuffing down the brick steps beneath the neon sign. Behind him, cars hissed past in the perpetual drizzle that was endemic to the city this time of year. Not even summer yet, according to the calendars, and all it did was rain. Then it would bake into the slow wind-up that would lead to the stultifying heat of summer, turning the whole city into a steamy cesspool of pent-up frustration and bodies that, no matter how often washed, still came home sticky at the end of the day. Neon pockmarked the night in smears, flickering in so many colors in awnings and windows, and Cullen was struck by the fact that this city had never seen its own ruin as had those across the water: the most strife cities here could lay claim to was fire or flood. Acts of the heavens, not of man. 

Well, and of course there were places like the Magisterium, he thought bleakly, descending the last of the steps to the door with a heavy tread. Clearly such dens of iniquity were threats to mankind on par with the destruction he'd seen in the trenches.

Clearly.

As soon as he pushed open the door, the character of the place announced itself. Painted men in glittering headpieces festooned the cramped entryway on posters and playing cards tacked to the walls. A tasseled cloth lamp of the eastern style cast a warm glow onto the gaily-decorated interior as Cullen waited nervously for the bouncer—a burly man with a goatee whose forks could probably spear meat—sized him up. 

_Not a cop, not a cop, not a cop,_ thought Cullen, risking a sheepish glance out at the bouncer from lowered lashes.

The bouncer grinned. “First time, eh?”

“I, ah…” Cullen trailed off.

“Don’t fuck up or you can fuck off. Head right in,” he intoned in a showman’s voice, totally at odds with his warning, and pushed open the swinging door, spilling light and smoke and music out into the vestibule. 

Cullen entered like a moth drawn to the flame. By duty, of course. Only duty.

Behind him, the bouncer laughed.

*****

Light was everywhere and nowhere, flickering and glowing, pooling over tables draped in velvet and festooned with feathers and sequins while leaving discreet corners wreathed in shadow, welcoming to whatever might happen there. Over the bar, a cityscape of hammered brass took in the light and reflected it; tossed it back and forth between miniature spires and domes, canals and colonnades and rivers harnessed and captured mid-tumble for all eternity in shining metal. Beneath it the bartender swabbed, as bartenders the world over do, his eyes catching everything—including Cullen—while giving nothing back; the piping on his silk vest playing a different game with the light than the metalwork over which he held sway. The shelves of liquor gave way, on either side of him, to marching ranks of mirrors, which in turn pulled the patrons in and threw them about, multiplying them and their intrigues into a whole new city of lovers and beloveds; schemers and players and connivers with satin eyes and sharp smiles. 

Cullen cleared his throat, sidling up to the bar as nonchalantly as he could while trying to keep his eyes from wandering over the men real and mirrored, and the bartender knew him at once for exactly what he was.

The bartender said nothing, only looked at him, one eyebrow raised. When Cullen only stood there, drumming his hands tunelessly on the varnished mahogany edge of the bar, the bartender was moved so far as to roll his eyes.

"I'm just...deciding," Cullen said, regretting his words as those of an idiot the moment they left his mouth.

"Yes, well, decide sometime before Christmas, would you? I've got one or two other paying customers tonight, if you've noticed." He jerked his head toward the crowded room.

"I, ah...yes." Do it now, Cullen told himself. Get it over with. But he knew that without having explicitly been offered liquor--that most bizarrely forbidden of beverages now, this side of the Atlantic--he would have little to show for this bust. And that was to say nothing of the other offerings, more licentious still.

Trying not to question his own motives too much, Cullen perched himself carefully on a barstool and mumbled something, repeating it again when the bartender only glared at him in response. "Erm, gin and tonic, please."

"Life of the party, aren't you," the bartender said dryly, and plucked a clear glass bottle from behind the bar. 

For some reason Cullen would later be unable to articulate, even to himself, he took offense at this and decided to press. To deviate from his scheduled bust-up.

"Considered boring over here, is it? What would you order?"

The bartender snorted. "I'd order whatever I could say three times fast and then shut my mouth." He looked out across the room, over Cullen's head. "Sparkler's almost on."

"Sparkler?"

"Look, do you want a gin and tonic or not? I'm not serving when he's singing. The owner's my brother, I'm allowed."

"Fine then. I'll have, er...." The low voices and laughter and filler music swirled around him, buoying him up, and Cullen felt a grin tug at the corner of his mouth. "The Last Word, please."

"Not likely," smirked the bartender, but Cullen was sure he amused the man. He hoped. Ice tinkled into the glas, and the liquor flowed.

Like a rainstorm, a chorus of shushes swept over the room, quieting conversations and damming them up into a rising pool of anticipation. Cullen turned, drink in hand, and caught the word "sparkler" on half a dozen lips nearby. This was the man the bartender had so wanted to see, then. Cullen supposed he could wait to do what he had to do. Just until the set was over. If he had to sip his drink to confirm that there was actual alcohol in it, well. All in a day's work.

The rose-colored stage curtain twitched open on one side, and it became clear immediately how Sparkler had obtained his name: the pinstripes on his suit--itself some sort of ice-blue silken material, not wool at all--were picked out in a silver thread that spangled the man's whole body, from his expertly-polished dress shoes to the cool lump of his Adam's apple. Every muscle moving beneath that fabric made it shimmer beneath the stage lighting, flashing out onto the crowd, forcing them to watch his every move.

As if they weren't all watching already.

The man, tall and dark with a mustache very much at odds with the times, grinned at the crowd, offering a flourishing bow as a few whoops ripped across the room, over the general applause. Clearly a local favorite, Cullen thought, watching. Sparkler swanned his way to the mic and gripped it lovingly, letting the crowd titter a bit over this play-acted tenderness.

And then he began to sing.

_"I have fallen, I have fallen I have fallen on the patio / because I've drunk a little, smoked a little, talked a little too much on my owwwn."_

More whoops followed the opening lines, and Sparkler let the man on the piano take a few measures on his own while he played to the crowd, snickering and waving to those he recognized--or who would kill to be able to believe he recognized him. Cullen watched, rapt, as Sparkler strutted about the stage, clearly in his element, sparing even the bartender a smoldering look--one that nearly sent Cullen tumbling off his seat, as he first mistook the gaze's target to be himself.

_"I want some fine conversation / not a back acceleration of you. And let me tell you if you know you’re not prepared to do the decent thing just put me to bed."_

More than a few of those watching called out that they'd be perfectly willing to do just that, and the smirk Sparkler threw them was anything but discouraging. Terribly bold of them, Cullen thought. And terribly foolish. What if someone upstairs were to hear? What if someone were to find them out? Someone like...him?

Sparkler slunk on through the song, favoring nearly everyone with a glance or a gesture. The tinkle of ice at the bottom of his glass was the first indication to Cullen had that he had even been drinking--when had that happened? So much for the last word.

_"I'm not being proud, just wearing a shroud tonight / but if we're going to do this thing then let's do this thing ri-i-iight."_

Sparkler wove that last word up and down his vocal chords, leaving all possibilities open as to what doing this thing right might be, and Cullen had to look away. It was stupid, it was distracting, but he very much wished that he, like this crowd, could be favored with one of Sparkler's glances. When he caught himself wanting this--wanting this from this lounge singer in this bar he'd come here to shut down--he turned his gaze to the brass city above the bar instead. And kept it there, even as he found himself wondering what kind of shroud the man meant--a hood, a robe? A towel?

_Stop thinking,_ Cullen ordered himself sternly. _You're here to end this._

_"In fact I just realized that I've been too much on my ow-ownnnn."_

With these final notes, the onlookers erupted into applause, and Cullen watched in the mirrored walls as reflection after reflection of Sparkler bowed and bowed again, his silk-sheathed body accustomed to the grandiose motions of the stage. Perhaps too much so, Cullen found himself thinking--almost as though he expected this kind of nightly adoration; expected it and more. The cop found himself wondering whether the singer was ambitious, and again he chided himself for letting his mind wander.

Just one more drink, then, he thought. Just so I can tell the precinct without a doubt that it's liquor being served down here. Just to be sure.

And I won't say anything to them about the boys, he found himself thinking, catching the shape of his nose, the flicker of his scar in the smooth surface of the drink the bartender set in front of him. Just this time. Just this time they'll get the chance to run, get out, before we show up.

"Don't tell me you're drinking one of Tony's inventions," purred a liquid voice behind his ear.

Cullen spun around fast, too fast, and for the second time that night almost toppled off his stool. This time thick, silk-clad arms caught him and set him upright.

"I..." Cullen coughed. Loudly. A distant part of his mind registered that, though the piano man noodled valiantly on in the downtime between songs, the audience had quieted and firmly anchored their attention on their former serenader--the same one who, just this moment, was fixing Cullen with all of his focus. "It's called the Last Word," Cullen croaked, ridiculously hoarse all of a sudden.

Up close, it was clear Sparkler oiled his mustache and the little scrap of beard below it--probably with something scented, Cullen thought, ashamed at having noticed but noticing all the same. At his response, however delayed, Sparkler's face lit up in one of those stage-worthy grins he'd treated the crowd to earlier. "The Last Word, really? How charming. Is that the latest thing, then? Or some old classic we hadn't yet thought up in our homeland before I left?" His accent announced himself as Cullen’s compatriot. How long, Cullen found himself wondering, had Sparkler been stateside?

"I, er. It's...new," Cullen admitted. A policeman during Prohibition admitting to knowledge of the latest and greatest cocktails was perhaps not the wisest individual, he thought. But it was true. 

"And do you find yourself often having the Last Word?"

"No. Er, yes. Er...not like that."

Sparkler laughed, and Cullen watched the man's lips as he did so. He wished, suddenly, that he'd sat closer during the song--that he'd been given more of a show. There was much to study here.

"You make me feel like a specimen," Sparkler commented congenially, sliding onto the stool next to Cullen. "Do you find yourself doing _that_ often?"

"Your song was...good," Cullen offered, attempting to change the topic.

"They certainly don't make them like they used to," sighed Sparkler, rapping smartly on the counter. "Bartender? I'll have the usual--wait." He caught Cullen's eye and flashed him an impish hint of a grin, much less constructed than the dazzling smiles he'd summoned on command on-stage. "I'll have what he's having."

Tony the bartender raised an eyebrow, then busied himself behind the bar as the singer returned his focus to Cullen. "Here," he said, extending his arms out, palms-up, wrists exposed above the blue silk and glinting silver cuffs. "Or aren't you the kind of policeman who likes handcuffs?"

Cullen felt his jaw drop. Felt the jolt of electricity shoot through him as Sparkler leaned forward and shut it for him, two fingers beneath his chin.

"Oh come now, officer, did you think I didn't notice?"

Cullen gulped the remains of his second drink, willing the alcohol to loosen his tongue from the roof of his mouth where it seemed to have taken up permanent residence. "I didn't...I'm not a..."

Sparkler tut-tutted, taking his proffered drink from Tony and swirling it around in the glass with one hand, counting on the fingers of the other. "Stranger, check. Painfully casual outfit, check. Knows far more about alcohol than you want people to know you know, check. Nervous--well, let's see, check?" Sparkler reached forward again, and Cullen had to resist the urge to jerk away from those two fingers placed delicately on the stubble of his chin. Sparkler met his eyes straight on and kept his fingers there, grinning. 

"Oh, I dare say you're nervous, but you're doing a hell of a job hiding it."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Cullen gulped, fighting for air. _This is what happens when you don't do what you said you'd do,_ he told himself fiercely. 

"And now you're telling yourself you regret letting it go this far, aren't you?" Sparkler sipped his drink, eyeing Cullen over its rim, his eyebrows quirking up in merriment. "That's what you're telling yourself, but you don't really regret it that much, or I'd be in handcuffs now."

Cullen swallowed.

"Unless--oh you poor thing, you'd like that, wouldn't you?"

"I don't...need your...pity, Sparkler."

Sparkler barked a short, sharp laugh--glitter of teeth, twinkle of real mirth in his eyes--before quaffing the remainder of his drink in one exaggerated motion. "If we're going to be friends, it might be nice not to be referred to as the toy these Americans so love to parade about when they celebrate their victory over us." The man stuck his hand out, palm-down, almost as though he expected it to be kissed. "Dorian--lounge singer extraordinaire, style icon, and general _bon vivant_. At your service."

Cullen looked at the hand a moment, drink beginning to cloud the corners of his brain. His fingers closing around Dorian's felt frigid compared to the blazing heat emanating from the other man. Like a campfire in winter.

"Cullen," he said. First names only. It made sense, but two could play at that game. "I'll admit it's odd to find another Brit on stage in a...bar..."

"And _I'll_ admit that it's a bit odd to find another Brit on this city's police force," Dorian replied without missing a beat. "What, was London full up when you applied?"

"I haven't been home in years," Cullen mumbled. Hating that the other man had thrown him off-balance so easily, he tried to rally. "What about you? There have to be places like...this...back home."

"There are, and you know it." Dorian smiled viperishly and sipped his drink. "But I don't think home means the same thing for you as for me. You, at least, can parade about out there with your scar and your medals--I assume you have medals?--and pretend to be the big war hero still in search of that bonny lass. I have less...patience...for pretense."

Cullen blinked, wondering which part of this analysis to pursue first. "How did you know I...er..."

"Captain--you're a captain, surely? A Major? Ah, captain it is, then--do all of us here a favor and don't assume the only people capable of figuring things out from looking at them wear shiny badges." Dorian smiled a little again, then--to take the sting out of his words--but only a little. When Cullen only looked at him, waiting for him to continue, he sighed. "Oh, fine. I'll spell it out for you. I knew you'd been to such places back home--and maybe in France too, for all I know--based on how you're acting in here. You're sheepish but not slack-jawed. You knew where to go to keep an eye on things without being approached, even if you were bad at it and--" Here paused for a calculated flick of his tongue across his lower lip. "--Even if I approached you anyway. You know how these places work. You're rusty at it, but you do. I'm guessing you'd just gotten up the courage to try and become a regular when the war broke out. And then there went that out the window, like so much else. Am I right?"

Cullen stared at him.

"Oh, don't be dour. I can't stand dour. Tony? Another drink for our friend here."

The bartender looked at neither of him as he mixed the drink, the only indication of his feelings on their exchange coming to the surface when he thunked the glass down on the bar with more force than necessary. Then he hurried to the other end to attend to some waiting customers there, and Cullen and Dorian were left alone once more. Cullen's eyes darted from Dorian to the bartender's retreating back, questioning.

"He's jealous. Surely even you could pick that up."

Cullen glared. "I did. I only wondered why." 

"Now now, don't get sulky. I'm not a huge fan of sulk, either. As to why he's jealous...I don't generally sashay about the room like this, after a show. I don't think he likes the change in plans."

"Should I feel honored?"

"Well, that depends." That viperous smile again. The man had more smiles than a cheshire cat. "Do you?"

Instead of answering, Cullen drank. Intending to drain the whole glass, he tipped it back, only to feel a warm hand close on his wrist, tugging him gently back.

"It's a good drink, this Last Word," Dorian purred--lower now; almost below hearing. "It'd be a shame to waste it in a single gulp."

"What makes you think I'll be sticking around long enough to enjoy it?"

Dorian removed the glass from Cullen's hand carefully and brought it to his own lips, sweeping his gaze across the room as he drank. Cullen followed suit, and saw the whole room try to pretend it hadn't been watching them either directly or in the mirrors--the rain-wet newcomer and the sparkling man, huddled together like old friends (or more) at the glimmering bar.

"They're jealous, too," Dorian said softly. "You'd be foolish to stay here longer." The way he lingered on here made it clear there was another option, however, and the man had the audacity to waggle his eyebrows suggestively.

Cullen giggled, despite himself and despite everything.

"There now, that's what I was looking for. No one can be serious all the time, even if they're faking it. I should know." He extended a hand. "Now if I may be so bold, officer, shall I show you around the upper floors of our fine establishment? If you're going to arrest us, after all, you ought to see what you'll be getting."

"I'm not arresting anyone." Cullen blushed.

"I know that. Come on."

Cullen stared at the hand offered him, its rings winking in the flickering light of the bar. He could feel the onlookers' eyes on him like coals. "They must hate me." He kept his voice low.

"Oh, they definitely hate you," Dorian replied, plucking Cullen's own had from where it lay on the bar and dragging him forcefully off his chair. "So much so that I'm afraid it falls to me to shelter you from their wrath. Up the stairs, now."

After only a moment's hesitation that the booze he'd already swallowed helped him stifle, Cullen allowed himself to be pulled across the room, keeping his eyes trained--well, he didn't want to meet the eyes of the crowd, after all!--on Dorian's behind. It was, he admitted to himself with no surprise, an impressive behind. The finely-tailored silk suit left nothing to imagine there. 

"Admiring, were we?" whispered Dorian, spinning round when they reached the clinging shadows of a dingy stairwell, his face suddenly inches from Cullen's.

Cullen, feeling light-headed from all the last words, all the attention, had to work his mouth a few times before words came out, and even then they weren't the ones he intended. "I--I want to kiss you," he rasped.

Dorian rolled his eyes. "Tell me something I don't know."

"I want to do more than kiss you," Cullen tried again.

"I know that, too, gumshoe. Anything else?"

Cullen swayed a little and reached out a hand to steady himself against the--surprisingly firm, it turned out; where did lounge singers build up muscle like that?--chest of the man before him. "I know," he whispered, leaning forward intently, "that you miss home no matter what you say, and that I remind you of it and that's why you brought me back here. You could have anyone in that bar and you chose me and that's the only reason."

A thin beam of light reaching the stairwell through a gap in the curtain lanced across Dorian's face, and Cullen could see something stir there. Hurt? Resignation? His stomach clenched at the thought--why had he said that?--but flipped over in joy as Dorian closed the space between their faces, tucking his finely manicured chin right up against Cullen's ear so it tickled.

"Touche, Captain."

Cullen held very still. 

"But do you really imagine," Dorian continued, his breath hot on Cullen's skin as he spoke, "that I would sully my reputation for something so negligible as nostalgia?"

Cullen swallowed so hard it hurt, but he had to answer. He felt that if he answered wrongly he'd find himself right back out on the street. "It's not negligible. Not now."

"Oh? And why not now?"

"Too much has...changed."

A hiss at his earlobe. "That's an old man's statement."

Cullen leaned back, trying to see the other man's eyes. Wanting to know that this, at least, had been heard and understood by someone else, even if it did end up with his untimely removal. "We're all old men now."

Dorian regarded him for an unreadable moment, then broke it with a chuckle. "I am bringing the only poetic policeman in this city into my boudoir." He tugged Cullen forward, up the stairs. "Lucky me."

"Hey now, don't sell us all short," Cullen whispered back, grateful for the darkness that hid how wobbly his knees had become. He'd worried he'd shattered all this, back there. Why had he said that?

"Don't tell me you stay up late Friday nights at the precinct, writing each other sonnets?"

"Perhaps not that."

"Well then, I repeat. Lucky me." 

They reached a landing and Dorian whirled, grabbing Cullen by his lapels and slamming him against a wall. Before Cullen could think, he'd brought his arms up and around, outside Dorian's straight-armed grip, and chopped downward, breaking his hold. The two men stood there panting in the blue-then-purple light filtered in through a dirty glass window that looked out onto the street at eye-level. 

"Old training," Cullen said, to say something.

"I know." Dorian eyed him for a moment in that blue blaze of light. "I wanted to...test you. See if I'd been wrong."

"You weren't. I was a Captain."

Dorian waved a sparkling hand dismissively. "Not about that. I mean about your..." He chuffed air through his lips, making his mustache flare for a moment. "We're both hiding, Cullen. If you're going to dig around in my head you need to be honest with yours."

"I wasn't trying to--"

"Doesn't matter." Dorian took a step closer, cupping Cullen's face in his hands. His touch tender. "If we are to--look, I told you I don't often do this. And you're right, I could if I wanted."

Cullen only watched him, enjoying the feel of those fever-hot hands on his face. Warming him.

“I haven’t heard...our speech in a long time. It gets so you miss it. It’s changing, you know--what people say, and how. All the movement, all the phrases and stories, mixed up during the war.” His gray eyes shone wolf-like in the neon’s reflection, ghostly pale in the stairwell’s shadows.

“Were you a linguist, then? An interpreter? A...did you listen to the wires?” Cullen had to ask. Wanted to share in it, this otherness they already smelled on each other, like foxes before the baying hands.

Dorian’s look, though, was hooded, and Cullen worried he had asked for too much. “A spy, you mean, Cullen. You want to know if I was a spy.”

“I was only curious.”

“Do I look like someone who could just blend in anywhere?”

Cullen considered this from the fretful haze of his liquor, and spoke the truth even before he knew he was going to open his mouth. “I think you could be anything if you wanted to. And you did, and you didn’t like it. And so you’re here.”

Dorian shook his head, as if rejecting one retort after another. "Hide with me," he said instead, looking Cullen straight in the eyes. Now blue, now purple. "Hide away from all of it, with me, now. Even if you shut us down in the morning."

"I'm not going to--"

Dorian kissed him, and he fell silent, and they stayed that way for a long time.

*****

"Do you never sing, then?"

Cullen blushed and looked out the grimy window to the city, rain-washed and studded with the windows of the sleepless and the ember-like flicker of neon. "Not like that, no."

"But you sing sometimes."

Half of a shrug, because he worried two shoulders might be too much of a giveaway; attract too much attention. No luck, though--Dorian was crawling across the covers toward him in the dim light that seeped in from the streetlamps, his interest decidedly piqued.

"Sing for me," the other man insisted, close to his ear and inescapably aware of the effect of that low purr.

Cullen shook his head. "You do this for a living. You're a professional. You'll laugh at me."

Dorian had come abreast of where Cullen sat, now, and he craned his head around, leaning dangerously out over the edge of the bed, so the cop couldn't possibly miss eye contact. "It is precisely because I'm a professional that I won't laugh at you."

Cullen rolled his eyes, hoping the shadows hid his deepening blush. "I can't do...what you do. It's a style thing. I don't have style."

Dorian laughed, his mustaches catching the light as he did so, throwing it back into the darkness. "There is hardly only one style, Captain. Come on. Sing for me. Anything will do."

_I should have just said no,_ Cullen thought, running a hand through his hair. Really, he was terribly self-conscious of his singing voice. Any time someone caught him at it he wanted to dig a hole in the ground and disappear. His eyes groped around the room, seeking a way out. "I can't just do it alone, with no accompaniment, and I doubt you have a--"

"Guitar? My dear man, you sell me too short." Dorian rolled cat-like off the bed, landing on his bare feet--who _did_ that?--and padded across the tiny room to a jumble of shadowy belongings in the corner. Cullen's heart sank as the unmistakable pear-like swoops of a guitar emerged from the heap, clutched in Dorian's outstretched hands like a prize. The smile that tugged at his lips was triumphant.

"Oh, fine," Cullen sighed, reluctantly accepting the proffered instrument. "But the first snort and we're done here, I promise you."

"Understood." Dorian settled on the windowsill and folded his legs under him, removing a cigarette from some hidden location and lighting it European-style; cupped in his hands against an absent wind. He held it out to Cullen, who shook his head, bent over tuning the guitar to his liking.

"I don't smoke," he said shortly, to a chortle from Dorian.

"Of course you don't."

Cullen strummed a tentative chord. Outside, a car ambled toward the city's heart, the hiss of its passing rising high into the window where Dorian sat with his tiny flame. His eyes caught the dim orange light by his lips and reflected it, and it was as though some otherworldly creature stared at Cullen, back-lit by the streetlamp there in the window.

_Why didn't I just say no,_ he thought miserably, twanging an unpleasant note.

"Oh no you don't. No pretending you've forgotten how to do it now that we've gotten this far," smirked the man on the windowsill. Cullen could hear the smirk even if he couldn't see it precisely.

"That was an honest mistake!"

"Mm hmm. Just play, pretty man. I promise not to judge you."

"Everyone always says that."

Low laughter. "Well I'm not everyone, am I?"

Sighing again, just to make sure his discomfiture was abundantly clear, Cullen bent over the instrument and squinted at the pale blurry form of his hand--more for obfuscation's sake, though, since he well knew the placement of his fingers without looking. Not that he planned on divulging this to Dorian. Haltingly, then, keeping his eyes carefully trained down on his hands and away from any body language that he might interpret as some kind of reaction, he plucked a few idle notes. What to play? It wasn't every day that one had to showcase one's meagre skills before someone who harnessed a vastly superior set of those same skills to make ends meet, after all. His mind flipped through the songs available to him: too old, too current, too...simpering. He was _not_ going to warble a love song to the lounge singer, of all things. Not after what he'd seen downstairs in the bar.

Almost without realizing it, Cullen's meandering plucking began to sort itself into particular notes, then chords, and he found himself playing something old after all, and very familiar. He paused, chagrined, when he recognized what he was doing, but only for a moment. _Might as well,_ he told himself silently, with a grim little shake of his head, and plunged onward, face blazing crimson and invisible as his voice rose to his surface like a fish toward air, toward the surface of a pond that was the roof of his world.

_“Will you say when the night is long / the sheep are sleeping and the moon's gone / I left you defenseless as stars at dawn._

_Oh wo wo wo, stars at dawn / Oh wo wo wo, stars at dawn.”_

Cullen swallowed, noodling a refrain to make up for the sudden departure of his voice. He shouldn't have played this. He should have played anything but this. Better to be laughed at, to have played a bawdy seaman's tune or something. But there was nothing for it, now--he had either to finish or to face unwelcome query as to why he couldn't. So he soldiered onward.

_"Will you say to me when I've passed / that the winds were cold and the warmth don't last / Your hands letting fly with red petals cast_

_Oh wo wo wo wo, petals cast / Oh wo wo wo wo, petals cast."_

He hummed a verse next, as was his tendency, and even without looking he could sense Dorian's stillness and his attention; it radiated out at him from the windowsill and made him even more nervous than he was already. But he thought of the last time he had played this song, and how he had stopped, unable to continue, and he refused to stop this time. _Let me finish it this once,_ he thought, and cleared his throat a little before picking up the verse again:

_“Will you say when the sun is high / I never loved you, I lived a lie / that like shadows the sun brings me there then gone ___

_Oh wo wo wo, there then gone / Oh wo wo wo, there then gone_

_Will you say when I'm just a ghost / that of all the dumb boys you loved me the most / that your brother still loves you though day has fled,_

_Oh wo wo wo, day has fled / Oh wo wo wo, day has fled…”_

A little more strumming, to close the verse, and there he was: the damage done, the words out there in the air, weighing it down worse than any summer downpour's damning heat. Cullen felt his throat close up toward the end, and had to swallow a few times, carefully avoiding meeting eyes with the figure in the window, who had yet to move. 

"Who was she?" asked Dorian, wreathed in shadows, voice low and strangely delicate, as though wary of placing a foot wrong.

"M-my sister." _Pull yourself together, Cullen._ He shook his head to clear it.

"Before?"

Cullen nodded. They both knew Dorian meant the war. "It was a lullabye. She was very young when I left. I'd sing it to her, in case--" _Damn it all to hell._ "In case I didn't come back. But I did." He scrubbed a hand through his hair, digging his nails into his scalp as he drew his hand back, trying to shock himself into control again. "The influenza, though, it, it--" He laid the guitar gingerly on the bed beside him. Something to busy himself with; something to _do._ "I had wondered. The letters--they stopped."

With nothing left for his hands to hold, nothing to tend to, his body gave up the fight and the sob that had been lurking at the back of his throat seized him forcibly, bending him, bowing him over into a quaking curve of flesh strung over heaving bones, there atop a thinly-covered field of squeaking springs. A distant voice at the back of his mind cursed him in every tongue he knew for the ridiculousness of this, for the openness of it, for ever touching a stringed instrument again. For ever raising his voice in something other than a shout, a bellow, a furious challenge to fate; anything but this dry, helpless heaving.

And then he felt himself tip sideways as a new weight on the worn bedsprings threw him off-balance, into an embrace he neither anticipated nor knew what to do with. Muscles that had no place behind a microphone, or in a grimy American apartment or anywhere else, held him upright, held him close as he convulsed, scraping his face against the hair on the chest he was pulled into. 

"I'm--I'm sorry," he mumbled into the hair, hating the shaking in his voice, in his body. He tried to rise, to swallow the sobs and push himself away, but Dorian held him close with one arm, smoothing his hair with the other.

"We've lost so much," he said into Cullen's temple, his mustaches tickling the damp skin there. "If we give it no voice it will consume us."

Cullen sniffled mightily, curiosity giving pause to his sobs that force of will hadn't. "Is that why you sing?" he asked, fearing both the answer and its denial: it would be easy, he thought, to press too far. To demand too much, too many roles, for the showman content to be the comforter and not the comfortee.

Dorian was silent a long moment, contributing greatly to Cullen's fears, before speaking again in those sad, low tones that could turn conversation to song, to a lament, so easily. "It's why anyone sings," he said, rocking Cullen back and forth, into and out of the dirty yellow light cast by the streetlamp outside the window.

They stayed like that for a long time, as the yellow squares studding the night winked out one by one, and the cars whooshed past, tires spinning off into a night too dark and too vast to be imagined. And for once, there was no need to imagine it, to confront it, there in the dingy flophouse over the bar. For once, it was enough merely to have said what had been said, and to be held.

For once, all of it was enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Cullen's song is imagined to the tune of [Each Coming Night](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viXMXo1aG-Q), by Iron & Wine.
> 
> The Last Word = gin, lime juice, green chartreuse, maraschino liqueur.


End file.
